Free Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

would have stamped his im-print on it swiftly and indelibly, and it would have come to look exactly like this one did. It was the corner office, twice as large as any of the others, and it was at once elegant and eccentric, refuge and crucible, more a home than an office to the man who sat behind the great black rosewood desk before the windows. It was carpeted in deep, velvet-gray plush, and had a gray tweed sofa and two of the legendary, consummately beautiful Eames armchairs and ottomans. A glass and chrome étagère stood between the windows, and glass and chrome end tables and a cocktail table made a conversational grouping around the sofa and chairs. An Oriental area rug glowed like a jewel against the gray plush.
    Twin

    ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 58
    speakers hidden somewhere on the wall of books blasted out
    “England Swings Like a Pendulum Do.” There was not a vacant square inch of surface in the entire room.
    People slumped in the Eames chairs and crowded onto the sofa, sat on the floor around the coffee table, sprawled on the Oriental. Some smoked and some drank coffee and some did both. The surfaces not occupied by people held things: books piled until they spilled onto the floor; magazines and record albums; sheets of photographic prints and contacts; large dummy sheets; mail both opened and unopened; cameras and agfaloupes and magnifying glasses; jars of rubber cement and mugs holding pencils and Pentels and others holding the dregs of coffee; overflowing ashtrays; a tarnished silver tray with a beautiful, dusky black bottle of something surrounded by small crystal glasses. On the walls were framed covers of Downtown magazine from its inception; awards and citations; photographic portraits of many people I did not know and some, incredibly, that I did—all signed; and a great white calendar sheet that read December 1966, most of its squares penciled in, crossed out, rewritten.
    I looked around giddily, unable at first to see the man who lived at the epicenter of all this.
    Then he rose and came around the desk and gave me a swift hug and a kiss on the cheek, and said, “Welcome to hard times, dear heart. I’m Matt Comfort.”
    “Of course,” I said, and began to laugh. Everybody else laughed, too.
    Because who else could he be? He looked just like his office. He was elegant and eccentric and wonderfully appointed and charged with particularity, and there was not an inch of him that was not in disarray. Until the last day that I saw him, he looked, as someone said of The New Yorker ’s legendary Harold Ross—whom Matt admired inordinately—like an unmade bed, even though 59 / DOWNTOWN
    that bed was of the very best quality and outfitted by Porthault.
    He was very small. I had not thought of him like that, and even after I had known him intimately for years. I still never did. But he was scarcely five foot six or seven, and thin to wiriness; he looked, always, as if he had been fashioned out of fine copper tendrils. He was so far from handsome it was almost laughable: round-shouldered and a little stooped, with a large head and sharp, chiseled, ruddy features that looked sometimes Lincolnesque and sometimes vulpine; he appeared to be always in motion, even when sitting down.
    The air around him seemed to ring, as if with silent percussion. It was his hair that first drew the eye and somehow saved him from simple ludicrousness: it was a great, shining shock of pure chestnut that fell over his forehead and into one narrow green eye, and it was glorious. In that time of straggling beards and lank sideburns on the one hand and residual John Wayne brush cuts on the other, he had the glinting, sun-anointed head of the young Kennedy. This was never lost on anyone, and certainly not on Matt Comfort.
    He wore round, wire-rimmed glasses mended with adhesive tape, and dressed beautifully, in custom-tailored tweed and flannel and oxford cloth, though his clothes were invariably rumpled and semi-buttonless and his face